Last Curtsey
Page 27
Annabella’s later career might have been predicted: even as a deb she showed a streak of seriousness which prevented her from ever appearing quite attuned to that intensive party-going scene. Of Diane Kirk, now Lady Nutting OBE and a formidable figure in British public life, the opposite is true. Diane was only sixteen when she did the Season: this was a year younger than the norm. With her sparkling vivacity and air of wide eyed innocence Diane had always struck me as one of the most frivolous of debutantes, seen at all the dances, always ready with a quip for the reporters who adored her. The Evening Standard gossip columnist caught her at a party at the Duke of Bedford’s house in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea:
Miss DIANE KIRK, her complexion marble smooth, her dimensions right for Paris fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who chose her as one of his top 12 models, was outlined against a gilt-framed painting by Gainsborough.
Guests studied Miss Kirk, ignored Gainsborough. ‘You should see her in leopard skin trousers’ said an emphatic escort, who was later observed on his knees asking Miss Kirk out to dinner.
Yes, in 1958 that was our Diane.
What happened to transform the girl who then appeared as the epitome of debbiness into an authoritative member of some of the most influential national committees, particularly those concerned with architecture, heritage and the environment? Diane herself attributes her involvement in public service to her marriage, in 1959, to Earl Beatty, a distinguished wartime naval commander, himself the son of the famous First World War Admiral, the 1st Earl Beatty. At the time of Diane’s wedding to the already three-times-married David Beatty he was, at fifty-four, old enough to be her father, even at a pinch her grandfather, as many of our mothers noted with alarm. It was however a great love match, a sensationally swashbuckling Regency romance that Georgette Heyer might have written, and many of the debs both envied and applauded Diane in attracting such a glamorous, experienced older man.
David Beatty had had his own political career. He was Unionist MP for Peckham from 1931 to 1936 and later a Councillor for Peckham on the LCC. He encouraged Diane to enter politics and in 1968 she was elected to Westminster City Council, serving for ten years and becoming a member of the Town Planning Committee. Right back in her childhood buildings and the landscape had mattered greatly to her, and she revelled in the big pitched battles of that period over conservation versus urban renewal and commercial development. Diane, in speaking up for conservation, often found herself allied with the LCC’s Labour members rather than her own constituency of the Tories. In tackling issues that affected the face of Britain so profoundly she had found her cause.
David Beatty died in 1972. Diane’s second husband, Sir John Nutting, QC, a lawyer and since 1998 a Deputy High Court Judge, similarly supported Diane’s wide-ranging public work, viewing it a stimulating basis for a marriage that his wife should have her separate sphere of influence. From 1980 to 1995 Diane was the first woman on the board of Anglia TV. Simultaneously she was serving on the Council of the National Trust, she was a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission and, from 1991 to 1997, was a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund, empowered with the spending of enormous sums of money at what often seemed an impossibly fast pace. Diane had little formal education. She went, as most debs did, to a non-academic school and only caught up with her A-levels in her early thirties. But she has enormous curiosity and an instinct for arriving quickly at the crux of any given issue. She knows precisely what can be achieved by a committee and she loves her involvement in the processes of power. Currently she is Chairman of the Georgian Group, a member of the Cathedrals Fabric Commission and Chairman of the Prince of Wales’s Drawing School. The girl who told the newspapers in 1958 she was looking for a job ‘ideally as a film star’ has surprised us by becoming a magnificent grande dame.
Lady Beatty, the former Diane Kirk, photographed by Cecil Beaton at Chicheley Hall soon after her marriage to Earl Beatty in 1959
So far we have been looking at ex-debs operating within the conventions of previous generations, finding new possibilities within existing frameworks of ways of life considered socially acceptable. But there were also notable departures as some of my contemporaries baulked at the restrictions of the life they saw ahead:
Much as I enjoyed the Season I am glad that I decided on my particular path – the alternative seemed to be arranging another bowl of flowers and organising another dinner party ad infinitum, which though fun for a while palls after a bit.
This is the retrospective view of Margaret Chilton, who, as Margaret McKay, was one of the best-liked and most gregarious of debs. She changed course completely in the 1980s, once her four children were growing up. She took a degree in English at Reading University, a discipline which gave her her first psychological insights into character: insights notably absent from the social world we knew. She then trained as a counsellor and now has her own practice as a psychotherapist. These moves were opposed bitterly by her parents, who had brought her out so splendidly, especially her mother who had her sights set on an earl. But as Margaret soon learned from her professional experience, release from the burden of one’s parents’ expectations is basic to the recovery of self.
This was an era when many new careers were opening to women. Judy Grinling, the last of the debs to make her curtsey, became one of the new breed of graphic designers, a profession that burgeoned in the image-conscious sixties. Having trained in graphics at the Munich Akademie für das Graphische Gewerbe and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, Judy worked as an assistant to one of the rising stars of graphics: Derek Birdsall at BDMW Associates. Once she married the journalist and wine writer Hugh Johnson she freelanced in design and used a treadle press at home for letterpress printing. There were gradually more opportunities for women on newspapers and magazines and on television. Penny Graham gravitated from modelling to fashion journalism, becoming fashion editor on the Evening News. Auriol Stevens was the Observer’s education correspondent and a reporter for the TV programme A Week in Politics before she became editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. Holly Eley (the former Holly Urquhart) was assistant editor of the New Review before moving, in 1979, to the Times Literary Supplement where she is now art history editor.
Caroline Cuthbert (right) and Camilla Paravicini with Frank Sinatra in his house in Beverly Hills in 1962. The photograph was taken on Caroline’s Box Brownie by Robin Douglas-Home
Two other of my contemporaries rose high in the new world of arts administration. Annette Bradshaw joined the ICA in the early 1970s as the Director Norman Rosenthal’s assistant, then moved with Rosenthal to the Royal Academy where she eventually became Deputy Secretary. Caroline Cuthbert’s career had started as an art dealer. Before the Season she studied art history in Florence, Rome and Paris. Her background and contacts stood out as more cosmopolitan than those of the home-grown English debutantes. It was Caroline who wore a sensational deep-red satin dress by Lanvin at her own deb dance. She went to the States after her Season, travelling from coast to coast by Greyhound bus, stopping off in LA where she met Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Frank Sinatra, ‘the film stars we’d dreamt about’. She worked at Christie’s in New York and then returned to London, joining Anthony d’Offay’s Dering Street gallery in 1973 and becoming a director three years later. It was the highly driven and charismatic d’Offay who sharpened her appreciation of twentieth-century British modern painters – Wyndham Lewis, the Bloomsbury artists, David Jones. She learned a great deal of the psychology of artists since d’Offay also dealt in living artists, for example Richard Long and Gilbert & George. In 1984 she was invited to apply for a new post at the Tate: Curator in the Archives Department with special responsibility for acquisitions, negotiating with living artists and their heirs, persuading them to sell or leave their records to the nation. Caroline was instrumental in acquiring the Tate’s substantial Bloomsbury collections, the Edward Burra letters, the records of the painters’ muse Isabel Rawsthorne. She love
d the job’s aspects of a treasure hunt, each new discovery leading to another, and it proved an important post in relation to the shaping of the history of British modern art.
Caroline’s career has been doubly interesting in that, even as a debutante, she had been determined never to get married, negating at the outset what the Season had in theory been all about. Besides what she had suffered through her own parents’ separation, she was terrified of what she saw as the innate restrictiveness of the married state, the tedium of having to refer your decisions and actions to another person. She described this to me as a dread of being ‘subsumed’. She held out until she was in her early forties when she married the writer Jonathan Raban who had similarly been resisting marriage. They were together for the next five years.
Jennifer Murray, the former Jennifer Mather, record-breaking helicopter pilot
I do not think that I am forcing things in claiming ours as an exceptional year in which quite a proportion of the upper-class young girls sloughed off their old image of routine frivolity and began a process of reinvention. The departure of the debs into unexpected spheres is epitomised by Jennifer Murray, formerly Jennifer Mather, who in 1997 was the first woman to pilot a helicopter around the world. At the age of fifty-seven she entered the Guinness Book of Records, having flown 22,173 miles in 99 days and raised $100,000 for the Save the Children fund. She now claims that she had never quite conformed. She had been the ‘country bumpkin’ in the Season, not even knowing how to paint her toenails like the other more sophisticated girls. She was deeply influenced by her hugely energetic industrialist father, Sir William Mather, Chairman of Mather & Platt, the Manchester engineering firm, who was always setting her new challenges. After the Season Jennifer had gone to art school, studying textile design. She started her own textile company in Thailand in the 1960s, the decade in which Thai silks became high fashion. She then formed another textile company in Hong Kong. From the early 1990s, as we have seen, her ambitions refocussed on aviation. In 2000, dispensing with co-pilots, Jennifer achieved another record of being the first woman to fly solo around the world in a helicopter. The journey took her eastward from England through Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Vietnam and onwards around the circle of the globe. She is now making her second attempt to fly from Pole to Pole. As with the apotheosis of Sally Croker-Poole, one’s initial response is of total disbelief. Is ‘Jeffa’, the heroine helicopter pilot who posts those upbeat bulletins on the internet, really the same Jennifer whose dance at Whirley Hall in Macclesfield, shared with her sister Gillian, I remember going to in 1958? Jennifer’s press statements are wonderfully positive. Her intrepid circumnavigation of the world in a small piston-engine helicopter without autopilot must surely act as encouragement to others: ‘Hopefully this shows people they can do anything if they really want to – no matter what their age or gender.’ She has certainly succeeded in challenging the image of the vapid and unadventurous ex-deb.
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In one of the most fascinating chapters of his book The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, David Cannadine points out that ‘throughout its long history as the governing class of the nation, the British landed establishment had always spawned its fair share of mavericks and rebels, dissidents and revolutionaries’. He cites the seventeenth-century country squire Oliver Cromwell; Charles James Fox, eighteenth-century aristocratic chief spokesman of the Whiggery; the twentieth-century Labour aristocrats and ‘the Fascist notables’ as part of ‘a long line of titled and genteel renegades’. He could have included as part of this phenomenon a particular strain of female rebelliousness within the upper classes: the conscience of the debutante.
One example of an attitude frequently regarded as a form of class betrayal can be found in the memoirs of Margaret Haig Thomas, later Viscountess Rhondda, who became a militant suffragette member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, was arrested and sent to Usk Prison where she went on hunger strike. As founder and editor of Time and Tide she was a staunch campaigner for political freedom and individual liberty. In the early 1900s, her years of coming out, she endured three London Seasons which she describes bitterly in her reminiscences This Was My World as a form of tyranny:
A system which hypnotized a perfectly intelligent, though perhaps rather a naïve young woman already anxious to investigate most accepted notions impersonally and dispassionately, into acceding without question to indulgence in this odd form of occupation, which in fact she was hating so much.
In the growth of her feminist politics those three debutante Seasons had been her baptism of fire.
In a later generation, in 1935, Jessica Mitford had glowered through a Season whose meaningless rituals and foolish luxuries seemed to her increasingly obscene in a world in which fascism was growing. She had fallen in love with Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s cousin, a precocious class rebel who had run away from Wellington College where he had been publishing a left-wing magazine entitled Out of Bounds. Encouraged by Romilly, Lord Redesdale’s fifth daughter became a Communist. She read the Daily Worker, immersed herself in Marxist books and pamphlets. ‘Now I was really a Ballroom Communist with a vengeance’, she wrote of her coming out, describing its frustrations and ennui: ‘I had made no real friends, had learned nothing, was no further advanced in the planning of my life. I cursed myself for not having the brains or the ability to find my own way out of the deadly boredom that was enveloping me like a thick fog.’ Eventually she and Romilly left for Spain together, supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. With her trenchant politics and her caustic turn of phrase in describing the sheer idiocy of the upper classes, Jessica Mitford was the prime pre-war example of the anti-debutante.
For anyone with the disposition to be critical the contrasts within the Season were dramatic, like a medieval painting simplifying the distinctions between luxury and poverty. The gawping crowds around the palace watching the debs coming to be presented: ‘Crowds used to watch because they enjoyed looking at pretty people and pretty clothes … we were pretty butterflies’, one debutante recorded at the height of the Depression. The armies of retainers: waiters waiting, cloakroom ladies hanging coats and running the warm water for the debutante ablutions, dance bands playing, photographers capturing and posing the most impressive guests. At my own dance at the Dorchester, the ancient fortune teller paid to tell young girls what they were wanting to hear most. For the most far-thinking of the girls who found such scenes of conspicuous consumption sickening it was not a simple matter of resenting the unfairness of the rich having the parties while the underclass sustained them. The most dissident of debutantes arrived at a position of believing that the upper classes should not exist at all. Such debutantes, content at nothing short of a dismantling of the system, have inevitably been looked upon as traitors by many of their peers. This was Jessica Mitford’s political position. Nearer our own time there has been Vanessa Redgrave, whose Season in 1956 pre-dated her involvement with the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and my own friend Teresa Hayter whose considerable journey from an embassy childhood to International Marxism is described in her autobiography Hayter of the Bourgeoisie, published in 1971.
Thinking back over Teresa’s Season I cannot find the signs of her incipient revolutionary politics. There are pictures in the scrapbooks of Teresa at deb tea parties looking a bit bored and out of things, but docile. We see her in the long receiving line for her own deb dance, shared with two others, Olga Hohler and Delia Dupree, standing between her parents Lady Hayter and the enormously distinguished Sir William in his stiff white shirt, glittering with decorations. He had just retired from the Foreign Office, having been Ambassador in Moscow, and was now the Warden of New College in Oxford. Teresa’s dance was held at Mercers’ Hall, one of the ancient city livery halls only recently rebuilt after its destruction in the Blitz. According to Jennifer’s report of the occasion, ‘The three girls, in dresses of pastel shades, created a memorable picture as they stood with their mothers receiving the guest
s.’ It is interesting in view of Sir William’s recent Moscow incumbency, and indeed Teresa’s later history, that one of the guests listed at the Hayter ball is Sir Anthony Blunt, at the time Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, who was subsequently revealed as a long-term Marxist and a Soviet spy.
Teresa does not mention her Season in Hayter of the Bourgeoisie, an otherwise detailed personal account of her radicalisation to the point of joining the International Marxists, a revolutionary Trotskyist group. She examines with rigorous honesty a childhood exposed to ‘the blandishments of bourgeois apologetics’ in a charming and well-meaning intellectual household, describing her parents as ‘fine representatives of what is best in bourgeois ideology: liberal values, a belief in progress and reform, aesthetic and literary appreciation’. She confesses to the laziness and callowness of her three years at Lady Margaret Hall in an Oxford of snobbery and indolence, virtually unchanged since the days of Evelyn Waugh: